Dancer, like Colum McCann's previous novels This Side of Brightness and Songdogs, is an elegant weave of historical fact and fictional imagining. Here his central character is the late, great, Rudolf Nureyev--the Soviet dancer who defected to the West at the height of the Cold War, partnered Margot Fonteyn and became ballet's first international male superstar. The "real" Nureyev remains an enigmatic, even iconic figure--as infamous for his petulance, lavish lifestyle, voracious sexual appetite and tragic AIDS-related death as for his dancing. McCann wisely eschews a straightforward account of Rudolf's outrageous life. His sympathetic portrait of the priapic star, which seems oddly weak on dance itself but certainly has scenes to rival The Satyricon, is ingeniously discursive. Nureyev is often more omnipresent than actually present--his story related through a serious of diary entries, reports and different narrative perspectives and voices, including the dancer's own. (On occasions, he even briefly drops from view entirely and the travails of his family, friends and his mentors, the Vasilevas, come to the fore.)
Divided into four loosely chronological sections, the novel spans the length of Nureyev's dancing career, opening in Stalin's war-ravaged Russia, where the young Rudolf earned sugar lumps for entertaining wounded soldiers, and closing with his last sickly, performance and a final, fleeting, visit home. Exile and displacement are really the chief themes of the book and McCann's Nureyev is a man scarred and agitated by the decision to abandon his homeland. "I dance", he notes at one point, "so much--too much--in order not to think of home". McCann seems to imply, however, that it is his disapproving father, who never saw him dance, who fuelled his relentless ambition. Forays into cod-Freudian psychoanalysis aside, this gripping reinvention of Nureyev, rich in period detail and characterisation, is well conceived, marvellously wrought and eminently readable.